Mods for Almost Everything

It’s amazing how many mods there in Warframe. Mods for your weapons, mods for your Sentinels, mods for your cats, dogs and infested monsters, mods for your Warframes themselves, mods for your Archwings and mods for your Archwing weapons. With the Sacrifice, we got the ability to mod Exalted Weapons, the weapons created from Warframe abilities (named after Excaliur’s Exalted Blade ability). There’s only three things that you can’t shove a mod into: your Space Kid, your Space Kid’s arm cannon and your ship. Chances are, at some point, you’ll be able to shove mods into them too.

It actually used to be that you’d shove mods into other mods to rank them up. Fusion Cores were what you used to rank up mods, alongside any duplicate mods you had, and it would be a slow, tedious process to upgrade mods with multiple levels (particularly things like Primed Flow). These days, you get Endo, and you can dissolve duplicate mods into Endo to fuel your addictive mod-upgrading habit. But you’re still technically shoving mods into other mods. And considering how many duplicates you might get over time? It’s worth going to your mod station, sorting by Duplicates and seeing just how many you have.

But despite these vast quantities of mods, there’s a TON of them that are unused.

Okay, to be fair, some mods are pretty useless. No one would use Warm Coat as there is very little pure heat damage in Warframe that’s likely to affect players. Territorial Aggression is a waste of a slot on animal companions since there are only three places where wild animals are even a thing, and in one of those places they are utterly harmless. And Heavy Impact (a mod which is literally Rhino’s passive) does more harm than anything because ideally you want to roll and keep your momentum while bulletjumping around.

But the uselessness can be overly skewed. The problem is that you’ve only got 8 mod slots on your weapons, and only two additional utility slots on Warframes. You need to use these wisely.

That means that, unfortunately, you don’t have space for things like reload mods or mods that do anything apart from give you more damage. You have 8 slots, one will be used for your base damage mod (Serration, Point Blank, Hornet Strike, Pressure Point), one or two will be used to increase multishot or attack speed (Split/Hell’s Chamber for primaries, Fury for melees, Lethal Torrent and Barrel Diffusion for secondaries). Then you’ll want to put your critical chance and critical damage mods on (another one or two mods), and you’ll probably want to fit in some elemental mods as well (most likely toxin and electricity for Corrosive damage). Oh wait. That’s five or six slots already filled. Possibly more if you go for mods like Heavy Caliber (+damage, -accuracy) or set mods like Vigilante Armaments (+multishot) or Augur Pact (+damage) which are cheaper, weaker versions of standard mods.

Basically, you’re trying to shove as much damage into your weapon as possible. There’s no space for utility!

It gets worse though. Not even all +damage mods are good. A mod giving more Impact or Slash damage might sound interesting, but in reality, it’s simply not that useful outside of niche builds, because Impact/Puncture/Slash mods only increase those respective damage types, while elemental mods increase all damage. You could throw on a +damage to Grineer mod, but that’s an utterly wasted slot if you forget to swap the mod out before you go and fight the Corpus or Infested. And slot space, restricted to 8 for guns and 8 plus a stance mod for melee weapons, is a limited canvas for you to work with.

Warframes though have it easy. Not only do they get Aura slots to increase the number of slots they have, but they also have Exilus slots, which are there solely for quality of life mods like Handspring (getting back up faster after getting knocked down) or Thief’s Wit (loot appears in your minimap) or Enemy Sense (literally enemy radar). Then again, everyone kinda just uses Drift Mods, since they do things like increase Range or Power Strength by a tiny amount. And at the same time, depending on what Warframe you use, you’re not building for pure power anyway. Someone like Valkyr will build for high armour and efficiency, while Loki players tend to build for range and duration. There’s still a struggle, but it’s slightly less of a struggle.

Melee weapons have stance mods as well, allowing you to add extra capacity too, but even then, you do struggle to get extra room. Forma are basically required on most items if you want to run at peak condition, especially when a lot of weapons come with no polarities…

Still, there are some mods that I feel are missing. Not just Primed variants of mods (or in this case, Umbral and Sacrificial mods too) but actual specific mods that might actually be useful. I’m mainly thinking of Corrupted mods, that have both a positive and a slightly smaller negative. Maybe things like increased reload speed and decreased accuracy. Or maybe things like reducing shields in exchange for increasing health or armour and vice versa. In fact, we could actually do with some opposite mods. I’d love a +duration, -power strength mod, the opposite of Transient Fortitude, or +duration, -efficiency, the opposite of Fleeting Expertise. An opposite of Narrow Minded (+range, -power strength) might be a bit too strong though.

The problem is, we haven’t really seen any new mods in ages. As far as I can remember, the most recent mods were a handful of normal versions of +damage to Corrupted mods, Fulmination (increases explosion radius for pistols) and some new Warframe augments.

Then again, we have so many unused mods, do we really need more?